The European Federalist Party is disappointed with Chancellor Merkel’s speech at Davos on January 24th, where she proposed the adoption of a competitiveness pact via contracts between each member state and the European Commission, to be approved individually by national parliaments. We believe her formulation of a pact amongst “nation-states” is anachronistic and insufficient to face the challenges at hand. In the context of a single European market with uniform regulation and policy objectives, high-level convergence cannot be efficiently achieved through over 27 separate agreements with differentiated content.

Furthermore, we view individualized approval of agreements as burdensome from a bureaucratic and timing perspective, leaving Europe in a competitiveness policy limbo, in standstill for several years; instead the existing supranational economic policy mechanisms (such as the legislative authority of the European Commission and Parliament) should be used to their maximum capacity.

Chancellor Merkel’s favored intergovernmental system of “cautious little stepwise interventions” at the European level is no longer suitable to lead us to a more prosperous future – the poor response of the economy to such interventions in our recent past attests to that fact.

The European Federalist Party (EFP) is the pan-European party for a more democratic, united and solidary Europe: a Europe of the people and for the people. The EFP was founded in 2011 in Paris by citizens from all over Europe and has since developed into a cross-border movement with thousands of members and supporters and chapters in 9 EU states. The EFP was instrumental in the introduction of several key laws and reforms in the EU, including improvements to the Lisbon treaty, the European Citizens’ Initiative and the EU roaming regulation.